Individual, Small Business, and High-Dollar Sellers Do Not Benefit
For sellers that depend on a higher percentage of listings actually turning into sales, and for sellers whose margins are very low, fees effectively increase and/or become a major concern across the board—in some scenarios rather significantly. The increase in final value fees is likely enough to make some sellers think twice about investing more energy in eBay as a marketplace.At the same time, the changes in feedback policy do not benefit sellers whose businesses aren’t volume-based or whose items are not commodities or are very high in value. The inability to leave negative feedback for buyers renders useless the buyer criteria tool, which allowed sellers to automatically block bids from buyers with questionable feedback profiles. It also removes any leverage small sellers might have with problem buyers, while leaving those buyers free to post negative feedback about their sellers.
Buyers Do Not Benefit
Despite the ever-present cries from buyers (usually buyers new to eBay or buyers who only buy on eBay sporadically) that eBay is a seller-biased marketplace, these changes do not help eBay buyers. Though they address one of the most common complaints from periodic or new eBay buyers (the potential to receive negative feedback from sellers), they contribute significantly to buyers traditional complaints in at least two ways:- They encourage an already cluttered eBay to become more cluttered than ever. The same buyers that complain about getting negative feedback from sellers also often complain about eBay search results full of endless identical items at identical prices from multiple sellers, often turning up in searches that weren’t meant to look for such items. These changes encourage precisely these sellers to continue and even intensify this selling technique.
- They remove a critical component of feedback. More experienced eBay buyers have always known that one important way to evaluate a seller is to look at the feedback that they have left for others, since this gives a very clear picture of how they deal with problems in the buying process. Sellers that leave lots of snide negatives for those who buy from them are sellers to be avoided. With sellers now able to leave only positive feedback or no feedback for buyers, a critical gap is left in buyers’ ability to evaluate sellers: how does a given seller respond to a damaged shipment or a dissatisfied customer? Going forward it will be much more difficult to evaluate sellers' responses to transaction trouble.
- Already draconian seller policies are likely to become more, not less, restrictive. Return policies will become more stringent since the majority of sellers will be paying more for each transaction, and shipping fees (where many sellers recover final value fees that eBay charges) are likely to increase as well—another area about which new buyers in particular often have eBay complaints.
Responses and Opinions
The response from the selling community on eBay has been predictably intense, with calls for a seller boycott of eBay and a kind of informal media blitz that has even landed in places like YouTube. Most sellers, suffice it to say, are not happy with the thought of increased fees, competitive advantages for very largest of sellers, and less leverage in dealing with problem or new-to-eBay buyers.To many, the changes appear to be misguided on eBay’s part. eBay has never been the ideal forum for high-volume commodity selling, they say, given the nature of its technology platform and implementation—buyers are already frustrated by dozens and dozens of identical, uninteresting, commodity listings from impersonal PowerSellers, and these changes will only make the problem worse, priming eBay to become a less diverse marketplace rather than a more diverse one.
Independent and small sellers have always been the primary attraction on eBay, many argue—the place where one could buy anything and everything that wasn’t available in stores—the place to find and buy unique, one-of-a-kind, and used/discounted goods at fair prices. What isn’t clear to anyone is the notion that eBay can compete as a commodity seller against the likes of Amazon.com or other online retail giants; it’s possible that the auction-and-listing format isn’t the correct venue for this type of selling, and that in a head-to-head contest between eBay and Amazon.zom (which appears to be what eBay is working toward), with similar selections of goods, Amazon would win simply as a matter of ease-of-use for the buyer.
At the same time, the sphere of buyers that has traditionally been upset by eBay’s pro-seller culture and feedback practices are largely low-volume buyers or one-time eBay buyers who aren’t familiar enough with eBay to save themselves avoidable mistakes, and who aren’t motivated (whether as a matter of preference and convenience or as a matter of the types of goods they tend to buy) to learn about eBay enough to trade there more regularly. It’s not clear that eBay will be able to capture such buyers with these policy changes, and even if they do, some suggest that it will be at the expense of pushing longtime eBay buyers—who have been satisfactorily driving eBay sales already—toward other venues.
The quest for year-over-year market-outperformance is clearly driving eBay once again to make changes. Whether or not this will change both eBay and the market that it serves irreversibly over time remains to be seen, as has been the case with policy changes in previous years.
